


Holly Berry Wreath

by TheCokeworthCauldrons



Series: The Shrike and The Thorn [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Bad Romance, Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Choking, Hatemates, M/M, Sirius needs to take a walk but he can’t and it’s killing self and others, Unresolved Murderous Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, dark desires, i listen to Mitski when I write so bear with me, mutual hatred, pretend I posted this for the holidays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:41:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22667941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCokeworthCauldrons/pseuds/TheCokeworthCauldrons
Summary: Sirius wonders as he chokes a man if he’s a bad person.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Severus Snape
Series: The Shrike and The Thorn [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1316315
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	Holly Berry Wreath

Of any Order member, Sirius knew he was better than Snape. That he never helped on missions infuriated him, when the fugitive was sure, without a doubt, more firmly than the sea held up the sky, that Snape was evil and himself, at least less so. At least better. Not good, but at least not bad. 

He hated the slithering spy. He hated how he slid along the walls, folding through the shadows of his betters, towering over the women and weaving in behind the men. He hated how quietly he appeared at Dumbledore’s side, face always canted toward bored as per usual, hands hidden in his robes. He hated how those beetle black eyes found his back unguarded, taking advantage of what little safety Sirius had among old friends.

Snape couldn’t be distracted by friendly chatter like Sirius could. He hadn’t any friends. Snape didn’t have a godson to want the approval of, and so was never seen asking, falling short, needing forgiving for those shortcomings to the other, more gathered adults’ taste.

When they clashed, Sirius always gave in first to stymie the embarrassment, but sometimes he had to push. His pride could only take so much and continue holding him upright. 

And every time he ducked away to drink off disappointment—his, others—there smirked Snivellus. Happy to see him low. Successfully unloved. The spy, privately forgiven by whatever damnable means, beholden to a job that Sirius _knew_ in his whisky-rotten gut the man betrayed. 

Snape knew his worth and needled him. He was a thorn built to break through to wicked sides. He hated him passionately, more than any man left alive. More than Wormtail, some days. The rat was a coward, and when he finally stomped the life out of him, nobody would argue. By then, he might even convince Harry he needed to—but Snape eluded him. Across a room, pointed, insufferable; jutting out from the decent folk, deceiving them. 

But at least Sirius was better.

Then came one night in stark December. He knew the Death Eater had snuck into his house, hearing the creak from heavy boots treading his floors. Sirius felt the air shift as he stumbled into his parlor, bogged down by guzzling too-potent wine until that bitter dead of night. 

Then the hairs rose on his neck when like an eel through black water, he felt the shape of subtle heat and sharp shoulders slip past his back. Like the wall behind him rose as might a chest to breath, the parlor warped, old wallpaper shushing a thick robe that reeked of cloves, and a man huffed, and Sirius shouted, spinning, ready to tear into someone who simply melted away. 

He thought he went crazy, again. If not for the subsequent creak in the next room, which he set on like a bloodhound after a fox, he would have thought the drink or the loneliness or the grief or the constant simmering rage had peeled back the last of his senses.

He was drunk in his family’s home, so in the moment, he hardly cared. The determination to be insane _and_ find the bastard lurking in his halls overtook him, and like never before, his senses sharpened.

Not since Wormtail, not since the war had he hunted like this. He sped through the dark after the slippery shade, catching a robe hem snapping around corners, fuming, barefoot, pounding the grime into his rugs with how he ran. 

He dogged Snape down shadowed halls into the library, pitch black without the lamps lit and with all its back windows covered. Panting, Sirius padded heel-to-toe around furniture he knew by heart. For once, he felt bitterly glad for his weeks of restless pacing. He mapped the ruts of his running ground with his soles, feet silent as he dodged the loosest boards. For once, he came quieter than the spy, who stumbled over an ottoman, coughed musty air, breath rattling. 

Sirius realized upon rounding a dark table and, shivering with rage, stepping into the other man’s intimate space, that he smelled blood. Too late. He struck out, grabbing for anything—a wrist, a collar—and grabbed hair, sweaty and clumped, and cold with melting snow from the weather outside. 

“ _Shit!_ ,” a pained hiss, the short surprise and then, “Black—!”

“Shut up! Why’re you sneaking around _my_ _house?,_ ” he growled, pulling. The metallic tang came stronger and he couldn’t see, only hear and only feel and even more so _smell_ when his fingers curled in the bloody scalp. 

Snape was injured. Sirius registered this slowly through the returning haze of liquor leveling over him, and he wobbled, dizzy. No hard lines of bookshelves and chairs to bend against. The only real thing besides the black was his enemy, wilting, head heavy lolling from his fingers and the grown man feverish and shivering against his chest like a sick animal.

He lost himself in thought, drifting. Had he been sober, he would’ve reveled in Snape’s pain, loving the relief of being fifteen again. For a flash, young, a raw diamond, uncut; Sirius raining down at whim, relentless, easy as running water, eroding, carrying away the filth he wore away each time they met. 

_Is that bad?,_ he wondered, curling his arm around Snape’s throat, shrinking away from the firming shapes in the dark, preferring to rest his chin in the hair he fisted to keep the sputtering man still. _Am I bad for this one?_

“Where’s your wand, Snivellus?,” he slurred aloud, staring into nothing. He’d caught the sneak. He felt him struggle, but where were his hands? The man’s own fists? This wasn’t going as expected. “Fight me.”

Finally, he felt a wet palm slap his cheek. The copper tang hit, and he realized he may have been killing Snape. He wasn’t sure, as he couldn’t see how hurt he was. If Sirius ever wondered if the snake was hurt and how badly, he’d think, “Well, not enough.” Not enough to let up or stop or think twice or call for help. Snivellus never hurt enough, by his estimation.

Lupin said he went too far sometimes. Harry, Harry even—he said he’d been cruel, as a boy. Sirius knew that, although he never felt it in his spirit, not in school, certainly not in war, not in all of his twelve years in prison, and not then, when squeezing the life out of a man. Not a man: out of Snape, out of the thorn forever in his side.

“You’re not welcome here. Shh, stop,” he shushed, putting his hand over Snape’s mouth when the strangled, panicked breaths began to overtake the quiet. 

Snape kicked something over and it fell with a crash. Sirius hauled back, putting his weight behind his chokehold. Until then he had been almost comfortable. When his quarry settled down again, he laid his head against the bleeding other’s and decided he could fall asleep like this, cradling evil. 

Eventually the body wheezed and slumped, and Sirius dropped the dead weight, startled, stumbling back into a bookshelf. Thick, dusty tomes fell off the shelves and beat him over his head and shoulders. He whined, batting then away. One book fell with a thud—no, a witless man hit the carpet in a heap. 

_Thunk!_

“Oh,” he mumbled, massaging his pounding head. “Mm, damn…”

The lamps all clicked and warmed to a medium glow. Squinting in the light, Sirius staggered to the library doors and found he’d been sweating, told by the new, cooler air wafting in from his drafty hellhole. 

“Mutt, what’re you—,” so started and stopped the lazy baritone. A held breath, and there stood in the doorway, Snivellus stared at him with wide, black eyes, black like the dark but shining in the lamplight. Sprinkled with snow.

“You’re a madman,” Snape whispered, “What did you do?”

Sirius fell back again, stunned. Why, he couldn’t remember. His foot hit something. He looked down: a leg, of an unconscious man. A bit shorter than Sirius, grimy, scraggly hairs missing a cap; dingy robes and a gold tooth peeking from his slack mouth. 

“Dung,” Sirius belched, surprised. He spun around to grill Snape, although the bastard swam in and out of focus despite standing frozen, grey with shock. 

“I didn’t—I,” he tried again, and only kept eyes with the spy who stood in front of him and the deflated, petty crook. 

“Never a step away from murder, Black.” And the ugly expression turned uglier, and Sirius, usually glad to have gotten the best of Snape, withered.

He felt the kicked dog whimper tremble in his belly. All the anger that melted into that warm, killing peace fizzled away, turned to flurry and ice, chilling him. He knew it was Snape but felt the rest of the Order in his mind, aghast, shrieking. 

“You’ve killed him, haven’t you?,” Snape pressed. He raised his wand as if it wasn’t always hidden in his sleeve, aimed at his head. 

“No!,” but had he?

He tripped to his knees, pushing aside upturned books and skittering metal from a lamp hitting the floor. He groped for a pulse in Fletcher’s stubbly neck with numb, red-slick and too big fingers. 

By whatever grace, he found a thready beating. “No, no, I didn’t. He isn’t—you can’t—!”

“Liar!”

“Fuck you!” Sirius backed away, crawling, looking up at Snape stalking forward, looking too alive, hungry even. “He’s alive! Ch-check for yourself!”

“You’re _drunk._ ” Snape loomed over him now, stepping around Fletcher’s sprawled limbs to do it, slipping in an inch of blood spatter and perspiration and lamp oil. 

“You killed him in a drunken stupor, you _idiot._ ” He said it like he’d won, bearing down on Sirius, sneering, flashing crooked yellow teeth without a yellow lie between them, and something in his hand, something white—.

Sirius saw the Death Eater mask, morbid and freckled with gore. Then he surged to his feet, room spinning, all of it around Snape’s feral snarl. 

“I thought he was you!,” he roared. The force of his own yell pushed him back, hands up, warning Snape back although the man already stopped, brought up short.

The two men wavered, disheveled, and Sirius realized that Snape _had_ been hurt. Wetness soaked through his black sleeve and red dripped over his wand, dribbling off the tip in too ready a flow, spattering Fletcher gurgling on the ground. 

It dawned—mistily, but dawn it did. A battle happened that night. Nobody told Sirius about it, not even Remus, meaning either he was in a worse state with the Order than he thought, or it was unplanned.

Some impromptu gathering of scum down a dark alley, stumbled upon by one of the Order’s listening ears. The enemy opened fire. The only one to see Dung cursed chased after him—perhaps the one to curse him, given the wild way he watched the man bleed. 

“You killed him first,” Sirius croaked, ignoring for the moment that the man in question still breathed. 

Snape’s nostrils flared and Sirius wiped his hand on his brocade dressing gown, staining the satin. The spy curled a lip, although to the convict’s deep satisfaction, he was afraid. 

“If _only_ it’d been you,” Snape scowled before snapping into his own cloak, Disapparating with a crack. Maybe he left to get help or report to Dumbledore. He might have just fled, leaving Sirius to fall for his crime. He wouldn’t be the first of Voldemort’s lot to do it. 

_Criminal...drunk...stooge…_

He propped himself up against the carved leg of a reading desk, grunting when bumping his head on some tortured face worked out of the wood. He let the dizzy carry him into a doze against his family’s horrid decor. With Dung coughing to life, Sirius waved absently, “M’bad,” and nodded off on his floor.

He welcomed warm half-awake dreams of Snape’s throat against his forearm, the man bucking, gasping for help, cursing Sirius’s name as he slumped into unconsciousness. 

_Maybe I am bad,_ he thought as his body flushed and he woke up, liquid smooth, poured into his own bed with someone’s harsh, “And you’ll keep your mouth shut!”

The musty age of his own room and the tang of blood again. This voice he knew: “I hope you lose your arm, you slime.”

“I hope you choke on your own vomit,” low and hoarse in his ear as he lay threatened in his bed, Snape glaring down at him. 

He snorted, still slurring, “I hope if Dung dies that you get the ssss-sentence coming to you. You wouldn’t last a _night_ in Azkaban.”

“I've lasted _three_.” A stiff robe brushed his arm and he cringed. “I’ll pray every night that the moment you’re trusted with grown-up business, you slip up and lie slaughtered and field dressed on a stage for all to see.”

“You’d get off on it, sick freak.” A harsh bark, almost like Sirius laughed. Ah, he had. What for?

Snape leaned in, breath stinking, and murmured, “If I do recall, you strangled _me_ and left me dead on your family’s Persian rug.”

“He isn’t dead!,” he dearly hoped for the thief. What happened to him? Why did Snape carry him upstairs? He hoped someone was there to tell him tomorrow, after he dried out. “I didn’t...didn’t kill him. I’m not one of your scum-munching buddies.”

“Hmph. You had to check,” and again, the crack. And again, the silence.

Sirius lay there, shaking, sure until then that he was better than Snape. But when the low voice left his ear and he rolled over, loose and sweaty from his dream, he asked himself if Snape read his mind and noticed.

Would he be able to tell from looking? Sirius forgot again about fights or Fletcher’s wounds. When he thought of killing Snape and imagined him as struggling for breath, the pureblood got hard. Ogden’s be damned. 

Afraid of his own hands and where they’d travel, he lay stock still till morning. Remus found him still atop the comforter, grubby and sore from sobbing. 

**Author's Note:**

> [ Written to “Cop Car,” by Mitski](https://open.spotify.com/track/7DLCgotDOZZyiW4cuL1sgn?si=CBUyhODlTHCUWXZXkBaLig)


End file.
